Researchers at Kaspersky Lab (disclosure: my employer) has discovered a new piece of malware that plans Bitcoin miners on infected computers.

The idea is to steal computer resources from infected computers to generate the valuable peer-to-peer virtual currency.

Kaspersky Lab’s Alex Gostev said the new threat was discovered targeting Russian users with a Trojan that contains two components — a legitimate bcm.exe file BitCoin Miner; and a malicious module that installs the bcm without the user’s knowledge and adds it to the autorun registry.

The malicious hacker behind the Trojan did not generate any riches from this attack because the system detected the mining activity coming from multiple IPs.

Quote

“The Trojan is Infostealer.Coinbit and it has one motive: to locate your Bitcoin wallet.dat file and email it to the attacker…We have also discovered source code on underground forums which locates the wallet and, using FTP, uploads it to the attacker’s servers,” writes Symantec’s Stephen Doherty.